Buffyspeak

Omg, Spike is turned FIFTY last week. Where has my childhood gone? 

I love the Oxford dictionary blog for a lot of reasons and here's another one: an article summing up the jargon of Sunnydale. It touches on Whedon & Buffy writers nouning adjectives, puns and wordplay, and the Valley-meets-Sorkin low- and high-register mashup dialogue.

The OED even credits the Buffy movie & series for popularizing the use of much with a 'preceding adjective, infinitive verb, or noun phrase, forming an elliptical comment or question'. 

Linkfest [2]

A collection of language-related things that caught my attention last week:

• Arabic typography links: Joey (@joeyverse) gave me a book on Arabic design which is cool. (But holy cow it has its own design flaws. So many widows; it makes me sad.) Other cool things -- 
• The Top Ten Arabic Graphic Design Clichés
• Arabic corporate logos are so cool, see? see?
• Jayme (@aunicorninspace) thought this infographic on the history of western typefaces would be relevant to my interests. She was right. 
• I loved diagramming sentences in middle school. So did this lady over at the NYTimes, so she wrote about it.
• Idioms & The Eggcorn Database
• From the site: In September 2003, Mark Liberman reported (Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ???) an incorrect yet particularly suggestive creation: someone had written “egg corn” instead of “acorn”. It turned out that there was no established label for this type of non-standard reshaping. Erroneous as it may be, the substitution involved more than just ignorance: an acorn is more or less shaped like an egg; and it is a seed, just like grains of corn. So if you don’t know how _acorn_ is spelled, _egg corn_ actually makes sense.
• In my family, there's a related phenomenon called a "Robism" after my sister Haley's husband, Rob. He's a brilliant man (cf. Untamed Science), but his brain is... different. To Rob, an idiom is just a random string of sounds. It's a toss up if he'll get the words or the usage right. I am taking the liberty of publishing some of Haley's running list here. Love you, Bert.
• Let's crack a rip
• By the skin of their sheets
• Fundamental tablestone of belief
• Smartie two shoes 
• Bite off more than we can handle
• When she heard me giggling over the fact that Rob doesn't know the words to "Jingle Bells" (Jingle bells, jingle bells, marching all the way), Jayme told me about the Turian race of aliens in the Mass Effect universe because she's a dork like that. Turians try really hard to incorporate human idioms into their speech and writing, but usually do it wrong:

Subject: A fly in the lotion...
Commander Shepard,
I've come to have a lot of balls in flight, as you humans say. It was brought to my attention that you're still around, working on something secret. Frankly, I hope that whatever you do keeps you far away from Noveria this time, but if you must come back and, what is it, upset the fruit cart, let me know, and I'll clear a path for you for old times' sake.
A please as always,
Lorik Qui'in, Administrator, Port Hanshan 

• Votes and Vowels: A Changing Accent Shows How Language Parallels Politics
• Vowel shifts and this article are neat. Remember Mitt sayin' "y'all?" What a conniving little weiner.
• Instead of blogging about anything I want, I've been trying to keep my writings here loosely gathered around "words," which is a pretty broad topic. But since we're already talking politics and it's my blog, I just have to say what I've been feeling explody about lately: Seriously -- Let's get back to that SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE thing. Government can and should operate outside of the realm of personal and religious morality. Christianity dictates evangelism, not zealotry. From what I know of the guy, Jesus wants people to choose him, not be legally required to comply with interpretations of his teachings. It offends my Christian heritage and really all the rest of me that politicians warp goodness into a tool to mobilize the ignorance of their constituents to get them elected so they can make policy that makes them rich. Whew.

Writing style + Globalization [AND PUNS]

Are you kidney-ing me?

The fourth in my series on prepping your document for translation has gone up at KJInternational.com.

• Prepping your document for translation: Writing style + Globalization

Perhaps now is a great time to encourage any wordnerds out there to at least browse alt.humor.puns. Entire conversations happen in puns, and they're AMAZING. Here are some of my favorite gems from this string about James Bond: 

1. James Bond at 50 still has a license to thrill.
2. It's all a big Con, er re: ... well, Niven mind!
3. When Bond matures he gets Many-pennies Moore.  

Often, a thread will start on one topic (fishing) and change to another where the puns are better (inventors): 

1. Einstein never put bait on, he was a hook, line and thinker.
2. Unlike Edison he wasn't prone to tinker.
3. Not true, he had a patent interest in things.
4. None of these great men should be taken lightly!
5. It Tesla long story, some were waiting for a sine. 
6. Morse the pity, then! 

It got even weirder then: cows and udders and farm puns. AND I LOVE IT. I guess I'm my father's daughter that puns seriously make my day. To be so quick and light and upsidedown and sideways with words is something I truly admire.

Comic Language

My friend Brian sent me a link to this short comic about a nerdy, grammar-loving dragon. Made me giggle and then feel sad because sometimes I feel like that dragon.

I've been reading a few comics lately. I just finished Marvel: 1602, written by Neil Gaiman. Right now I'm in the middle of The Life of Captain Marvel. I just talked X-Men for the better part of an hour with my friend Joey. I've got comics on the brain.

Sexy.

(Tangent: I Googled the word "KTANG" (one of the sounds that Rick Jones's arm bands make when struck together to call Captain Marvel from the Negative Zone) hoping that I would find a cool picture to post here, but I ended up seeing a lot of Avatar: The Last Airbender fanart by people who 'ship Kitara/Aang. This is my favorite. And then I read the article "Use and Misuse of Power in Avatar: The Last Airbender." And then I commented on it.

So anyway, comics --)
Comics are usually a combination of both words and images, but is one of those two things more important? After all, there are comics that don't have words, and there are books that don't have pictures. When I read a comic, I usually zoom through it, mostly reading the words, only stopping to look when something is particularly eye-catching or essential so that I understand the story. Then, I go back at read it again, absorbing the art and how it interacts with the words on the page. I always read a comic twice. And that second time through, I'm always surprised by how much of the art I've already absorbed.

To be short, the answer is no. The images and the words work together. If you haven't read Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud, you should. It's a semiotics course, an art course and a design course all in one. Oh, and a comic book. #meta, y'all. Here's McCloud's explanation of how close the abstracted art of comics and the direct language of comics really are:

Language Log curates a tag for linguistically-aware comics.

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Also, here's a great quote from Leonardo DiVinci that I stole of off a great post about children's picture books:

And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.